Unholy Fury (15 page)

In the wake of Johnson's speech Gorton referred publicly to the anxiety within the Coalition parties about a possible change in US
Asia policy. But he went even further, suggesting that it may become necessary for Australia to abandon its policy of ‘forward defence' and adopt what he called an ‘Israeli-type' defence posture. Secretary of State Dean Rusk advised Johnson to try to influence Gorton's thinking in a ‘more helpful direction'. He pressed the president to make it clear that the types of comments the prime minister was making about America's future in Asia ‘can only contribute to producing the very result Gorton fears: a US public mood of isolationism'.
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Gorton's first visit to Washington captured perfectly the conundrum in which Australian leaders of this era found themselves. So eager to replicate the intimacy of the Holt–Johnson relationship, the prime minister seemed equally determined not to be seen as hopelessly captive to presidential pressure, particularly where that concerned the question of another increase in Australia's troop commitment to Vietnam. Initially at least, what seemed to win out was the desire to achieve the same kind of rapport with the president that Holt had enjoyed. The prime minister's desperation to do so, recalled Australia's ambassador in Washington, Keith Waller, ‘was one of those agonies to which Ambassadors are exposed from time to time'; Waller believing he should have been ‘given a sort of plenary indulgence of a thousand days for having put up with the Gorton visit'.

The new leader was ‘determined that the treatment he received would be not less than that which had been accorded Holt'.
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And on that score the Americans were in receipt of a most unusual request from the Australian side. Aware that on Holt's last visit to the White House in July 1967 the president had departed from the schedule to share an unceremonious sandwich with him, the Australians were hoping that the pattern would be repeated. Indeed they had even cancelled a lunch invitation from the US secretary of state—an extraordinary diplomatic faux pas—‘just in case the president should wish to extend the meeting' beyond the allotted hour. The Australian embassy in Washington had also apparently made it clear that Gorton's ego would be bruised if ‘he didn't get some of the Holt treatment'. According to Rostow, Johnson's special assistant for national security affairs, it was evident that the Australians were ‘hoping for another
sandwich'. Another adviser, tired of trying to resolve this Australian problem, confessed a certain annoyance at the antipodean exertion to extract from the president a ‘spontaneous show of instant fellowship'.
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In the end, the presidential sandwich eluded Gorton. But he was certainly accorded the VIP treatment—with Air Force One being sent to Honolulu to bring him to Washington (‘He was already one up on Holt there', Waller recalled). There was an invitation to dinner on the presidential yacht, an impromptu breakfast with Johnson and a weekend sojourn at the LBJ ranch in Texas, where he was briefed by the commander of US military operations in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland.

Yet still Gorton remained in a foul mood. It had all started badly on the yacht cruise down the Potomac. Gorton had been summoned to the boat almost immediately after arriving in Washington, and the invitation was deemed an ‘unexampled honour'. Yet in the words of Waller, ‘a more uncomfortable first meeting between two men I have never seen'. The leaders sat alone on the stern but as the vessel chugged down the river, and ‘what with the noise … having to shout against the noise of the motor and the noise of the wind, conversation wasn't terribly easy'. Johnson and Gorton were locked in a ‘conversational embrace … like a Marx Brothers film'. As a metaphor for an alliance somewhat adrift, the episode could hardly be bettered.
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According to his private secretary, Ainslie Gotto, Gorton might have been ‘tremendously impressed' with the welcome mat rolled out in Washington and on the ranch, but he remained ‘extremely nervous about Australian public reaction to that treatment', fearing ‘it would appear as if he was being bought'. Gotto complained that Gorton had read few of the briefs prepared by his officials, and stayed up so late each night that ‘after several days he was so groggy that his public speaking performances were affected'.
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The pressure on the prime minister was taking its toll. Keith Waller also detected the strain: though Gorton was flattered by the ‘honours and attention' from the president, he ‘soon sensed that the President was bent on “annexing him”, as if, Gorton said pungently, ‘I were a piece of colonial territory'. Far from finding the showering of privileged access exhilarating, Gorton found it quite the reverse, telling Waller
that he found Johnson ‘much too demanding'. The Australian leader said all the right things in public, but the lack of rapport in his private dealings with Johnson sprang ‘in large part from his feeling that he was being “captured”'.
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Yet even in the face of Johnson's characteristically overbearing presence, Gorton still wanted more guarantees from the Americans about their obligations under ANZUS. The prime minister was wavering about whether Australian troops would remain in Malaysia and Singapore after the British, as intended, completed their withdrawal from the region in 1971. The equivocation had only one cause: whether the Americans would ‘back him up' should Australian forces get into trouble. As Dean Rusk put it, Gorton ‘reportedly would like a firm guarantee of US protection before committing Australian troops'.
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In October 1967, Hasluck had left with Rusk a memorandum containing a number of questions about the applicability of the treaty should Australia decide to stay in Malaysia and Singapore. He was, in essence, asking not only for further consultations with Washington over its position on ANZUS, but also for the right to be able to make a statement to the Australian people concerning US military support in the event of hostilities involving Australian troops.
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The US reply was decidedly guarded, and came in the form of a letter from Samuel Berger, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, to Keith Waller. Berger had already privately told the Australian ambassador that the circumstances of 1963, when President Kennedy and Garfield Barwick had negotiated a secret memorandum over the application of the ANZUS treaty to Australian forces in Malaysia, had ‘disappeared', and that ‘any public statement would be likely to cause difficulties for the US and in the nature of things it would have to fuzz the US commitment under ANZUS. From the US point of view, the less that had to be said by anybody the better'. As Waller put it soberly in his report back to Canberra, this was ‘as much as we can expect from the US at this time'.
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The formal correspondence from the Department of State put it even more forcefully, spelling out that ‘we would not favour Australia justifying or explaining its position in terms of the ANZUS commitment'. For the Americans, it was as if this were a treaty that
dare not speak its name. In Canberra, Australian officials could only note that ‘current US policy offers no grounds that the United States Government would be more prepared now than in the past to define more closely its commitment under the ANZUS treaty'.
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And so the Americans were as immovable on this point as they had been over the Indonesia–Malaysia Confrontation in 1963, and the secretary of state merely told Johnson that there was no need to alter the ‘special understanding' that had been reached between John F Kennedy and Garfield Barwick.
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While strongly encouraging the Australians to remain in the region, there was no need to ‘give them a blanket guarantee of protection under ANZUS'.
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The ‘special understanding', of course, had reaffirmed the general principles under which the United States had approached the treaty since its signing in 1951: it obliged the Americans to do very little at all. What remained remarkable, however, was the dogged determination of Australian prime ministers and officials in this era to keep asking for yet more American assurances. It was as if they kept telling themselves that the more they asked, and the more they implied the doctrine of mutual assurance, the greater the chances of their ally uttering the magic words of an iron-clad commitment to the defence of Australia. The Department of External Affairs even provided to their political masters written ‘recitals' of all public and private comments by US politicians and officials concerning ANZUS. Every word, every phrase, virtually every utterance from the mouth of US officialdom was carefully parsed and dissected for what it might reveal about American thinking. If this was the augury of the ANZUS alliance, its portents were never as hopeful or optimistic as Australian leaders wanted them to be.

The Australian prime minister had badly miscalculated. On his return to Canberra, Gorton's senior foreign affairs adviser, Alan Griffith, gave a devastating appraisal of the Washington visit to an American diplomat: the whole exercise had been ‘a bit of a disaster', not least because Gorton had ‘overplayed his mission of sounding out US intentions in Asia'. It was apparent to the Australian press, Griffith noted, ‘that the President and others had turned the tables on him by pointing up that it was for Australia and other Asian powers to set the
course in Asia; the US performance in that area would depend upon Australia and others carrying at least a fair share of the burden'.
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Gorton returned to Canberra pledging a curious mix of old faiths and new fears. He declared groundless the concern that the United States was losing interest in Asia and retreating into isolationism. Yet he could not be more definitive about the applicability of ANZUS to the Pacific area and especially to Australian troops involved in the defence of Malaysia and Singapore. In answer to questions on this subject from the Australian press while in Washington, Gorton's mixture of contorted speech and confused reasoning was laid bare in perhaps one of the most inept performances by an Australian prime minister abroad:

 

Journalist:
From what Mr Bundy told us in the White House conference, he defined the ANZUS treaty as applying to forces of all the signatories in the Pacific Area. But he left ambiguous whether this would apply to Australian forces in Malaysia, Singapore … Have they in fact expressed any opinion on whether ANZUS does apply in that?

 

 

Gorton:
I wouldn't say any definite … I don't know I can give you any definite answer to that either. ANZUS is a treaty—I think it does apply in the three defined areas.

 

 

Journalist:
It does or does not?

 

 

Gorton:
I think it applies in certain defined areas. But I would want to check this with the External Affairs people before I was sure that that was correct. But by and large, I think it has been, what shall I say—I cannot think of the exact words—a matter—never spelled out whether it applied in Malaysia and Singapore area or not.

 

 

Journalist:
But that is exactly the point. It has never been spelled out. The point is have you made a judgment in your mind now as to whether it would apply to these two countries?

 

 

Gorton:
Well, you are asking really the sort of questions which one can pursue it to the point where it is the whole sort of subject of discussions. And I do not think I am free to do that.
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No exchange could better exemplify what the journalist Ray Atchison wrote of Gorton's public words, that they were ‘ill-constructed ramshackles of entangled ideas, jargon and obscurity … [where] one was left wondering about his clarity of thought'.
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Whitlam, however, was not left wondering about the political capital to be made from Gorton's muddle, and sniffed the doubt that hung like a dark cloud over the prime minister's White House deliberations. In the parliamentary debate following the visit, as Alan Griffith remarked, the Labor leader ‘walked all over Gorton'.
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Though he must surely have realised that Gorton's confusion stemmed from the lack of clarity in Article IV of the treaty itself, Whitlam was only too ready to highlight the government's discomfort: it had been ‘thrown into disarray by the sudden and spectacular collapse of policies and slogans which have been their stock in trade for a decade'. In a withering assault, Whitlam let fly: ‘We have the extraordinary admission that the Prime Minister of Australia cannot tell his people or his Parliament what Australia's rights and obligations are under ANZUS'. Reading out aloud what one newspaper report called ‘an embarrassing series of quotations from Gorton's news conferences in the United States', he attacked their ‘vagueness' about the ANZUS treaty.
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Gorton's credibility seemed to dissipate with every comment that had shown him to be ill informed on basic matters of Australian defence policy. It was ‘quite futile', Whitlam added, ‘to suggest on a treaty of such importance as this that policy can be based on some private understanding between two leaders of respective administrations'. And he excoriated the prime minister for the limitations of his world-view. ‘To define our role in Asia merely in terms of the maintenance of ANZUS—whatever region it covers—and to limit our responsibilities to our obligations under ANZUS is the narrowest view taken of our role in Asia since World War II, and the narrowest view taken of our role in the world since World War 1'. Whitlam never missed an opportunity to indulge
in historical hyperbole, but his attack sought to highlight too the damage the government's policy had done to the United States: